Throughout human history, intelligent people have believed many weird ideas. Their false and even delusional beliefs often served as the core ideology defining a tribal in-group. This is no different today, and as Thomas Sowell warned, ours may be the first civilisation destroyed not by the power of our enemies, but by the delusional academic dogmas promoted by activist ideologues. In an age of artificial intelligence, many academics have become purveyors of artificial stupidity.
The crisis in academia
Numerous fallacious beliefs that violate common sense and our shared view of reality have become widespread in academia. In a 2023 Gallup Poll 66 per cent of US respondents reported little or no confidence in higher education. A 2024 Heterodox Academy study concluded that universities are failing their mission of open-minded inquiry. The Presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were forced to resign because they were clueless about the purpose and values of their institutions.
This parlous state of affairs is related to the takeover of many university departments by Woke social justice activists promoting delusional beliefs about human nature and the nature of reality. Such single-minded activism is fundamentally incompatible with the open-minded search for truth that academic scholarship demands. Academics are well aware of these developments, but mostly remain silent. For false beliefs to flourish, not everyone must be a true believer – cohorts of opportunistic fellow travellers and some ‘useful idiots’ also come in handy. Disastrous ideologies like Marxism, described by Raymond Aron as ‘the opium of the intellectuals’, remain popular among academics despite their abysmal track record. These three typical delusional belief systems common in academia illustrate this phenomenon.
The ‘blank slate’ delusion
The delusional idea that humans are born with a ‘blank slate’ was promoted by J. B. Watson and B. F Skinner in psychology and Margaret Mead in anthropology. Totalitarian regimes, like fascism and Marxism, shared this ideology in pursuing their absurd utopias.
Obvious biological differences are now confidently denied by scholars who claim that gender as binary imposed by the colonial powers, determining sex in light of ideals of whiteness through ‘surgical racism’. This nonsense ignores the biological fact that every cell in our bodies is imprinted by chromosomal differences, producing profound variation on a wide range of traits. So changing one’s ‘gender identity’ clearly has no influence on one’s physical prowess in sports competitions.
Blank slatism survives because it provides essential academic support for social justice activism, asserting that unequal outcomes can always be rectified by interventionist policies. The blank slate ideology condemns our uniquely successful and egalitarian societies as hotbeds of oppression. Our universities now impose inquisitorial practices that, in the name of diversity, equity and inclusiveness mandate racist and discriminatory policies that undermine the principle of individual merit.
Humans, like all species have been shaped by evolution that produced profound individual differences in inherited traits such as intelligence, conscientiousness, motivation, and physical ability that play a crucial role in determining our life outcomes. Despite our impressive flexibility to learn and adapt, denying our biological differences inevitably leads to disastrous policies and social injustice.
The nominalist fallacy: words are not facts
Uniquely, humans can create imaginary symbolic realities, producing a common bias, the ‘nominalist fallacy’ when mere words are mistaken for reality. Entire verbal edifices such as psychoanalysis or Marxism have falsely claimed scientific status without sound empirical basis, as the philosopher Karl Popper showed.
The social sciences and humanities are especially vulnerable to the nominalist fallacy and many ‘theories’ are based on verbal pyrotechnics with little or no foundation in reality. In fields like science and engineering, false ideas are quickly discarded when they are unworkable, but incomprehensible nonsense can now masquerade as knowledge in the humanities and social sciences. Some insist that all reality is socially constructed; this may come as news to plumbers, engineers, and aircraft designers who inhabit a universe where reality matters.
The assertion that Woke verbal neologisms such as patriarchy, Critical Race Theory, islamophobia, intersectionality, de-colonisation, homophobia or just changing your personal pronouns may indeed create reality may be seductive, but manifestly false. Mere words exist on a different ontological plane than, for example, the workings of the computers used to create them, yet academics fail to see the absurdity.
Social constructivism sees truth as imposed by those in power, so incomprehensible deconstructionist verbiage claims equal epistemological status with science. Postmodern relativism undermines the foundations of science and destroys the principles of merit-based assessment. Institutional bureaucracies such as DEI units seek to create a new reality by enforcing ‘correct’ language use – eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s notions of ‘newspeak’.
Social constructionism has also invaded the natural sciences, claiming that science is just one of many equally valid ways of ‘knowing’, like folk mythology, superstitions, or religion. Mathematics has been denounced as inherently racist – a ‘white patriarchal space’ in need of de-colonisation by ‘theorists’ like Ibrahim Kendi. Algebra and geometry have been condemned as perpetuating white privilege, with minorities experiencing ‘micro-aggression’ in maths classrooms where merit rules. Calls to re-humanise mathematics and teach indigenous ‘lived mathematics’ instead of ‘numbers and arithmetic’ are now common.
Such nonsensical beliefs survive because social justice activism requires that reality is socially constructed. As Gaad Saad mused, this is like managing obesity by verbally declaring yourself ‘thin’ and insisting that everyone accepts this as your new identity.
The absurdity social constructionism theories has been exposed in several famous hoaxes where intentionally meaningless verbiage was enthusiastically published in ‘social science’ journals because editors liked bizarre claims like ‘quantum gravity has progressive political implications’. In another ‘grievance studies hoax’ 20 intentionally meaningless papers were submitted to social constructivist journals in gender studies and critical theory, with titles like, ‘Sex, planets and gender: A framework for a feminist astronomy’.
The myth of equality
All human societies feature hierarchies, seen by most classic philosophers as inevitable. Yet since the dawn of the Enlightenment, a romantic longing for communal egalitarianism has been a recurring feature of Western thought. Despite unprecedented growth in equality, the differential reward of individual effort and talent remains an essential feature of liberal societies.
So just how much, and what kind of equality, is desirable? Since the French Revolution, achieving the right balance between liberty and equality dominated Western politics. But these are mutually incompatible objectives – any increase in equality reduces liberty and greater liberty necessarily constrains equality.
Previous successful egalitarian movements rightly demanded equality of individual opportunity (eg. Martin Luther King, the suffragettes, etc.). In contrast, academic social justice activists now insist on equal outcomes, irrespective of effort and talent, calling for openly discriminatory policies such as DEI regulations to achieve it.
The single-minded focus on assigned group identity and necessary group conflict has Marxist origins. Academic theories such as Critical Race Theory or intersectionality assign people into strict oppressed, or oppressor groups, for the purpose of restorative discrimination. Individual differences in identity, values, and circumstances are ignored. This ideology sees success as the result of sinful advantage, and failure as indicating virtuous disadvantage and a cause for grievance and retribution.
By fostering a culture of helplessness, these academic theories handicap the very groups they claim to assist. Truth and facts also become irrelevant: all women must be believed, any male disadvantage must be ignored, ‘colonialists’ (like Churchill) must be de-platformed, the police should be ‘abolished’, and silence becomes violence (as seen at Black Lives Matter rallies). The implementation of these tribal ideologies by DEI bureaucracies requires systematic intergroup discrimination, often serving the interests of already privileged members of minorities.
The Orwellian falsification of Western history is an essential feature of this academic narrative, condemning Western democracies as sinful, exploitative, patriarchal, racist, and colonialist. Disagreement is sanctioned and dissenters are accused of ‘white fragility’ or having false consciousness in the classic Marxist tradition. Free speech is censored as ‘harmful’ to ‘vulnerable minorities’. The absurdity of this narrative is highlighted when media stars, senior professors, and even princesses claim victimhood and discrimination from positions of elite privilege, inevitably corroding the meritocratic values of Western societies.
The opium of the intellectuals
These delusional academic beliefs share many features with Marxism, a speculative quasi-religious ideology that has been the ‘opium of the intellectuals’ for almost 200 years. Marxism has produced disastrous consequences whenever it is tried, yet academic ‘progressives’ ignore this bleak reality and promote similar policies.
Marxism advocates violent group conflict to drive historical progress, and ignores the role of individual agency in shaping events. Marx proudly declared that his object in life is to dethrone god and destroy capitalism, not make excuses for the terror, and abolish all private property. In reality, workers everywhere just became more affluent – except, paradoxically, in Marxist regimes.
Eventually, frustrated activists like Gramsci and the Frankfurt School blamed the ‘cultural hegemony’ of the bourgeoisie and demanded a ‘the long march through the institutions’ to promote revolutionary consciousness. Academic theories like radical gender ideology, intersectionality, Woke-ism and Critical Race Theory achieved this by advocating tribal conflict between identity groups while ignoring individual rights and equal opportunity. As Nial Ferguson argued, ‘The Marxist-Leninist left … reconfigured the idea of the struggle into the terrain of culture … it created a new landscape in which … all that mattered was the hierarchy of victimhood.’
An Orwellian academic vocabulary was created focusing on subjective ‘lived experience’ instead of facts, employing loaded words such as ‘victim’, ‘survivor’, ‘colonialism’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘harm’, and ‘trauma’ to create an atmosphere of just grievance. Following Derrida and Foucault, many academics now reject the idea of truth asserting that ‘for the Critical Race Theorist, objective truth, like merit, does not exist … truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group’.
These ideologies offer seductive simplicity, certainty, moral status, group identity, and utopistic promises to gullible followers. The consequences for society can be serious, amounting to a treason of the intellectuals. Scientific associations now assert that gender is socially constructed, so underage children who cannot yet drive or vote may demand transgender treatments without parental approval and biological males now triumph in women’s sports events. Universities, academic job ads, and funding agencies practice active discrimination in the name of justice and equity, leading journals like Nature to reject articles they define as ‘harming vulnerable groups’, and Woke ‘lynch mobs’ attack editors and scientists whose work they disagree with.
Universities have now successfully indoctrinated generations of graduates into delusional ideologies that condemn our uniquely successful civilisation as corrupt, oppressive, and unsustainable. The proclaimed long march through the institutions is nearing completion and academic delusions are imposed on our society from above, increasingly rejected by voters whenever they get an opportunity.
There is a growing and almost unbridgeable gap in values between elite leaders and the majority of voters on many key issues. Delusional academic ideologies like the blank slate delusion, social constructionism, and the myth of equality inform many elite decisions, despite the lack of popular support. These beliefs undermine the credibility of our universities, compromise merit-based selection, justify discriminatory practices and promote a divisive culture focusing on race, grievance and conflict presenting an increasingly serious challenge to our liberal societies.
Joseph P Forgas, AM, Scientia Professor, UNSW